That was a great read for me because up until about halfway through I had just assumed based on the title that it would be about some kind of long running scandal facilitated on reddit.

It was a really great surprise that it just kept getting more and more positive. I wish more exposé style pieces covered positive stories like this instead of just stories on scandal, crime and corruption.

This story is about this iama "IAmA fella getting sentenced to Federal Prison in less than 48 Hrs. I am facing 10 years. AMA.":

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/chc3k/iama_fella_getti...

Resolution:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Youngluck/comments/cipv9/sentencing_...

I sidestory to this is the one about kleinbl00, who was an awesome redditor who had a bunch of people on the site seemingly turn against him.

He was basically driven off of the website, and almost never posts anymore.

It's kindof a bummer, actually. That guy posted really good comments.

Oh man, kleinbl00, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. His comments on reddit were solid. Like, metafilter level status comments. A lot of thought went into them and were the gold standard of why you read comments on reddit. Now the site is so huge, you'd either get lucky to find such comments or browse r/bestof.

Oh come on now, he wasn't drive off the site. He was really quite rude to a number of people and then tried to defend himself by saying that's just the way he is. Well, I'm fucking sorry, we can't have moderators of hundreds of thousands of people that say things like this when someone tries to defend themselves in a concise and coherent manner: "Respond to this reply in any way and I will ban you. Now go away."

Furthermore, he's even gotten people shadow banned on the site for minor disagreements. He is way too aggressive and then says it's not his problem.

Is politeness actually an important trait in a moderator?

I personally believe politeness is an important trait in any political job, and moderation is a political act.

Can you explain a bit about that? I followed the links in the article, and found them to be quite good, so reading this is kinda surprising. From my quick Googling, it seems like maybe someone thought he was pretentious, but can't really seem to get any more solid info. Did he do something that caused people to hate him?

> But kleinbl00 was also a tough-as-nails moderator when he needed to be, knocking heads of unassuming redditors who broke the rules.

From what I can tell, that was an understatement. I don't think there was any one big incident, but he often came off as pretentious and very confrontational and rude, and I guess enough people heard about that behavior that his comments stopped being well received, no matter how good they were.

A couple examples of what people didn't like:

https://www.reddit.com/r/kleinbl00/comments/e59s8/on_aggress...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j8sk9/am_i_being...

> but he often came off as pretentious and very confrontational and rude

This is about as accurate as it gets. He was intelligent, there's no doubt about that, but the problem was he believed himself to be more intelligent than he actually was. He literally was a know-it-all with an answer, solution and fix for everything.

The problem with intelligent people who are extremely arrogant is that they are among the most stubborn people there are. When something is inherently subjective, they don't see it like that. To them it's only objective because their opinion can't possibly be wrong. They won't concede a millimeter in a debate.

I've dealt with people like him before so his shtick was nothing new to me. I thought the guy was absolutely insufferable. For many others, he was a novelty when he first hit the scene, his articulate and well thought-out comments were refreshing. But the honeymoon doesn't last long. The more he types out, the more he shows his true arrogant and pretentious self. This is what essentially happened. People finally recognized and saw his ego for what it was, and they had enough.

People ran him off because they thought it was a group of people with a nefarious purpose. Since he was so knowledgeable about so many things, they just assumed he couldn't be one person. And of course, any time a group of people are on reddit that spell bad news, right? </sarcasm>

It makes me sad to see the direction reddit's community is going in. The mob mentality drives too many interesting people away :(

Obviously someone can't be so knowledgeable and altruistic without nefarious reasons. Gosh what do you think reddit users are, sheep?

/s

know of any good alternatives?

He's still posting it appears:

https://www.reddit.com/user/kleinbl00

A heart-warming piece about Youngluck, an artist who went to prison, and is now working on RedditGifts as a designer.

This reminds me that stories are the best way to help us develop our empathy.

So happy to see this on Hacker News. Dante is so important to us and it's great to see him get some recognition.

Until I read this I had no idea that Dante was Youngluck. It all makes so much sense now!

I'm sure there are people who like this kind of writing, but personally, If something is supposed to be news, I really rather get the facts.

The objective of this "journalistic narrative" genre seems to be to hide the information for as long as possible, only to reveal what happened at the very last moment.</rant>

This is not news, it's a story. In a story it's important to draw you in and take you on a journey. Facts don't do that on their own.

Totally expected to see this story: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/144dcp/what_is_th...

I was expecting the "today you, tomorrow me" post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2003515 (not that this one is not good too)

What an inspirational story! Thanks for sharing.

What happened to his friend?

TL;DR?

I hate to be that guy but can anyone give me a tl;dr? Where most of you might be running the lean startup and allow for 5000+ words to be read on a Monday, some of us have work to do.

Its a story about a man's experience with Reddit and how it helped him cope with difficult times. You won't learn anything reading it, its simply a well written story and a view into the lives of others.

If you have the time to write a snarky reply about how you don't have the time to read an article then you should reconsider some things.

Requesting a reasonable precis of a long essay is not unreasonable of itself. Especially when the packaging of a story itself is nothing but hyping its own greatness.

If someone's got time for a long read with no direct benefit of itself, that's fine, but there's no reason to cap on those who are simply seeking some context on the item.

There's far more content online (even just on HN) than anyone can possibly hope to assess, let alone read, in a lifetime. If Sturgeon's Law at Web scale were only six-sigma compliant, it would be a huge improvement.

If you have work to do then what are you doing here :) ?